BFG's GeForce FX 5900XT OC

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Testing with Unreal Tournament 2004 and Splinter Cell

Head-to-Head Performance With Unreal Tournament 2004

Epic's Next Smash Hit!

Unreal Tournament 2K4

Epic's "Unreal" games have been wildly popular, ever since the original Unreal was released in the late '90s. Unreal, Unreal Tournament, and then Unreal Tournament 2003, rapidly became some of our favorites, for both benchmarking, and for killing a few hours when our schedules allowed it! Epic recently released the latest addition to the franchise, Unreal Tournament 2004. We used the demo version of the game to benchmark these cards at resolutions of 1024x768 and 1600x1200, without any anti-aliasing, with 4x AA, and with 4X AA and 8X anisotropic filtering.

Each card that we tested performed well at 1024x768, and although the three GeForce FX based cards were usually in the lead, it was the 9600XT that stood alone at 4xAA with Aniso enabled, besting even the 5900XT OC. At 1600x1200, we saw more of a gap between the cards, as the 5900XTs pulled away from the other two. We also saw a huge increase of the BFG 5900XT OC over the e-VGA 5900XT at 4xAA. The 5 plus frames equaled a 20% increase in performance in this test. We saw more realistic differences in the other two tests, however.

Performance Comparisons With Splinter Cell

Stealthy Combat

Splinter Cell

Splinter Cell's version 1.2 patch includes three pre-recorded demos and incorporates a previously unavailable benchmarking tool. The demos included with the patch are somewhat limited by CPU performance, however, so we opted for the custom Oil Rig demo created by the folks at Beyond 3D to test with this game. Beyond 3D's demo removes two CPU intensive routines while increasing dependence on Pixel Shader performance. Shaders are used to render realistic looking ocean water surrounding an Oil Rig in the demo, as well as simulating a night vision effect for a brief period. Also note that anti-aliasing doesn't work with Splinter Cell. Due to this fact, we do not have any AA scores listed in the graphs below.

Splinter Cell is another benchmark in which we have seen a marked contrast to past reviews. Whereas the 5700 Ultra and 9600XT used to be more on par, we now see the 5700 Ultra in a distant last place showing, with the 9600XT and 5900XT more or less neck and neck, at least at 1024x768. The BFG model, however, gets an additional boost of 2 frames per second, thanks to its higher clock speeds. At 1600x1200, the normally clocked e-VGA 5900XT is 2.6 frames faster than the 9600XT, which is then further surpassed by the overclocked BFG 5900XT OC by an additional 1.82 fps.